


the house of special purpose

by arbitrarily



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Drunk Sex, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Sibling Incest, Trust Issues, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-01-25 07:36:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21352597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Shiv, Kendall, and the future.
Relationships: Kendall Roy/Siobhan "Shiv" Roy
Comments: 20
Kudos: 86





	the house of special purpose

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place immediately after the Season 2 finale. I also had no intention of this being so long, but, well here we are!

Are you planning to love me through the bars of a golden cage?   
TORRES

And I’m gonna need you to be careful with me   
Some day you’re gonna have to come home   
And I’m gonna need you to take care of me   
And you’re gonna need me too   
EMILY WELLS

i. 

Roman offered. Logan refused. Shiv was ordered.

She sits in the backseat of one of her father’s black town cars like the wife of a deposed leader rushed to the airfield before the rebels close in. She’s headed inland, to a Croatian television station. Then, it really will be to an airfield. Private jet, back to New York. In one of those places she’ll find Tom waiting for her. Maybe not. Maybe he’ll never leave their cabin on the yacht.

She left him in a state of panic that was just as much her own as his. “What does this mean for me?” That was what he kept asking her, even as she ignored him. As she tossed everything into a suitcase, messy and unfolded and soon to be wrinkled. She snatched frantically at a phone charger only to find it was still plugged in. They were two people rushing from a house on fire. 

“Shiv? What does this mean—”

“I don’t know!” she finally said. It came out as a shout, strangled by an emotion she would not name, and she stood up straight. She shoved her hair off her face. “I don’t fucking know, okay? I don’t know what happens next, I don’t know what this means for you or what it means for me. All I know is Kendall went on national television and pulled his dick out and announced to the world his is bigger and now we’re all fucked. Okay?”

It wasn’t okay. “You don’t care what this means for me.” That was what Tom said, and then he did not say anything at all.

Now, Shiv scrolls through her phone. She slips her foot in and out and in and out of her high-arched pumps. The ends of her hair, the collar of her jacket, scrape against the mild sunburn along the back of her neck. She fidgets, uncomfortable. Nervous. It’s a day later and Kendall’s face is everywhere. Op-eds in the _Post_ and the _Times_, even the PGM outlets, praising him for his boldness. “Fearlessness” is another word deployed and her jaw tightens as her back teeth grind together. She scrolls. _Vulture _has an article up,  LOVE TO HATE OR HATE TO LOVE? IT’S KENDALL ROY, BABY.  The _Daily Beast_ has posted a Kendall Roy Timeline, including everything and anything considered public knowledge about “the Waystar Royco scion:” his time at the Harvard Lampoon, his role for the company in Shanghai, his divorce, his children a mere footnote (including an editor’s note apologizing for the misspelling of Iverson), his failed attempt at a hostile takeover, and multiple allegations accumulated over the years of his lapsed sobriety. Among these are the stories Logan planted after Ken’s first failure to take over the company. She doesn’t fully recognize the man chronicled here; she wonders if the quote from an anonymous source about his bad judgment and his “gelatinous spine that anyone with a strong will and stronger hands can shape into what they want” came from her. She taps back to the main news page.  WHO IS KENDALL ROY AND WHY SHOULD I CARE _, _ _Teen Vogue_ wants to know. _Buzzfeed_ has a graphic to accompany their story, a very involved piece of digital art meant to be Kendall’s face and George Washington on the dollar bill. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she mutters under her breath.

Shiv is mentioned in most of these stories. Always tangentially—_Roy’s youngest sibling, his only sister, Siobhan_; _Siobhan Roy, wife of Tom Wambsgans, ATN’s Chair of Global Broadcast News_ and beneath is an embedded video of Tom’s blundering testimony armageddon. One article (_The Atlantic_) mentions her past work on Gil Eavis’s campaign. Another (_Slate_) refers to her as “Leni Riefenstahl in high-waisted pants.” She’s not entirely certain what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but she knows she’s supposed to be insulted. 

Out of curiosity, morbid more than anything, she goes to Vaulter’s website. The site’s been stripped for parts, streamlined, listicles and video content only, ads making the page slow to load.  THE BAD SEED ,  the top headline finally reads. She flicks her thumb until she reaches the very bottom of the page.

VAULTER IS A WAYSTAR ROYCO NETWORK. © 2019 WAYSTAR ROYCO, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

She drops her phone in her lap and glances out the window. The same fucking thing might as well be printed on her forehead.

Logan wanted her to do the morning shows. He wanted her as the first line of his public defense. “It looks good, it looks right, coming from,” and then he waved his hand in her direction. She felt that immediate sinking in her gut, Argestes all over again.

“You want me to wear this for you,” she said, flat but not resigned. It had been only hours since Kendall blew up their world but it felt like days. Weeks.

“It’s you, or it’s Gerri. I can’t have anyone else, not now. It has to be—”

“Yeah, yeah, a pair of tits and an empty womb to carry this shit to term.”

“And Gerri makes me look too defensive,” he continued, as if Shiv hadn’t spoken. “Legal counsel, like I’m on fucking trial here, they’ll think I’m fucked.”

“Dad. You are fucked. Kendall decapitated you in the town square. He’s waving your head around on a stick. If there was a time to be defensive, it’s now.”

Logan fixed her with a look. “If you’re too chickenshit to do this, Siobhan, just say so.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” But it was, wasn’t it? She was still a little girl, playing in her father’s office. Cowardice, she thought bitterly, had brought her here; why not finish the fucking job.

“You helped bake this. You can’t flee now that the whole place is on fucking fire.”

“That’s not fair.” There were a great many things in that moment she hated—Kendall near the top of the list—but the way her voice threatened to crack was truly despicable. That wasn’t fair either. “You did what you wanted. You made your choice.”

Of all the games their father liked, she knew a good charade ranked high among them. It was never going to be anyone but Kendall, and fuck them all for playing right into Logan’s hand. She had sat there with him, in that suite in Washington, and she watched him watch the television. Kendall’s face filled the screen, the same way it filled the screen earlier today and he had felt even farther away. She knew. Logan knew.

It was always going to be Kendall.

“Yeah?” Logan said. “And you didn’t try to stop me.” He held up one finger. “One concern, that spineless sac you call a man and yourself its wife.” He shrugged. “There’s your fucking choice. Honor it.”

They flank her at the town car and rush her into the news station. Reminds her of her early political days—cheap linoleum floors, stink of burnt coffee, mid-afternoon but everyone’s harried and rushed with not enough sleep sagging their faces. She thinks she was happy then but didn’t know that was the word for it. She lets them take her through to hair, make-up, the tiny studio with the green screen and the cameras. Karolina’s face overwhelms the screen of her phone she clutches in her hand as the reviews the talking points Karolina sent her on the iPad in her lap. Her dad’s men are arguing with the in-house producers. 

Shiv taps through the pages. She shakes her head. “I can’t say any of this,” she says. Line after line, they’re pinning everything on Kendall. Some lines are sorrowful and near beatific about how much she regrets his history of drug abuse, his volatile behavior, more than hinting and winking and nodding at potential mental instability and even illness but full-on unfurling a banner announcing it. “This makes us look like fucking morons. Like Dad was going to go ahead and trust his company in the hands of not his son but the Son of fucking Sam.”

“You know we have to discredit him,” Karolina starts.

“He has fucking proof. He has documents. He has a paper trail. What? We’re gonna say document forgery is one of his part-time hobbies? He likes to fake corporate documents once he gets himself loaded up with enough uppers he can hear the pigeons outside his window tell him corporate overthrow will save the world?”

“This is what Logan—”

“You know what? Fuck Logan’s judgment.”

“Siobhan, you cannot go out there unscripted.” She can hear the panic in Karolina’s voice. “You have to stick to the message. Isn’t that what Gerri told you?” Honestly, fuck Gerri, too. Shiv is’t dumb; Gerri’s focus, and her allegiance, seem to rest on, of all people, Roman’s diminutive scrawny shoulders. That’s a whole other thing right there, and frankly, she doesn’t have the time or the head space for it.

“Yeah, but Logan Roy’s filial improv troupe, has a nice ring to it.”

“Siobhan.”

“We specialize in backstabbing and birthday parties. Live-televised patricide.”

“You’re on in five.” In the space of her breathy pause and the width of Shiv’s phone screen, she can see Karolina has ducked her head, only her creased forehead and her hand, the nails chipped, digging into her hair, visible. Karolina takes a deep breath and lifts her head. The quality of the iPhone screen brings out the pitted circles under her eyes and the tight lines around her mouth. “We can cancel. If you don’t think,” and she stops. Shiv sets her jaw. 

Two nights ago, after dinner and after the sacrificial lamb announced his own future bloodletting and then expected them to eat, some real Messiah, Last Supper bullshit, Shiv left Tom in her cabin. She went out on the deck. The yacht was quiet and she was alone and she wanted neither of these things. When she looked out, she saw nothing, inky darkness that melded sky and water without a seam. The yacht was large enough she couldn’t feel it list in the water. She thought of the small boat she and Tom had taken out to the cove; she could feel the water then. She wanted that now. She wanted to feel the roll of it beneath her, the promise that there were forces greater than herself, than her father, at work. That she did not need to feel any guilt, not if her power was that limited. Not if she knew there was a current beneath them, not if she could feel it. Blame it.

“No,” Shiv says quietly. “It won’t look right.” Everyone knows she’s here. They’ve only dropped her name on air half a dozen times in the last two hours of the morning programming. If she bows out now, she’s spineless. Worse—if she leaves, her father’s guilty. 

“I can do this,” Shiv says. “I got it.”

ii.

“Hey, hey, man. It’s almost time.”

Early morning, Kendall’s place. The television screen takes up most of the wall, perky morning news chatter churning at a low volume. Greg is all legs, literally on the edge of his seat, as he glances from the TV back to Kendall. The chyron at the bottom reads:  LIVE with SIOBHAN ROY, NEXT! A commercial for fiber supplements cues up. They’ve been working here for the last twenty-four hours, Jess tasked with finding office space for them. The rebel army. 

The terrorists, as Logan would say.

And this morning, at a quarter to five, Kendall was by first his attorney and then the publicist his attorney hired: Shiv was doing the morning shows. Logan was sending her into battle. 

“I can’t,” Greg is saying now, “I mean, it’s not for me to say, but I can’t believe he’s got her doing this. Or, that she’s doing this? Or, no. Maybe this is definitely something she’d do?”

Kendall ignores him. He knows what they look like to anyone but each other—puppets inexplicably dancing to a song only they can hear, written by their father. Of course Greg can’t believe it. 

The commercial break is over. The hosts are there, plastic-faced and faux somber as they introduce his sister. The screen splits in half, and she’s there via satellite. He hasn’t seen her since the yacht. They did not speak after dinner—or at dinner, for that matter—and his disappointment in her has since settled into something both sour and inevitable. He watches Shiv carefully now. Her mouth is very firm and very tight and he can see the slightest twitch at the corner of it. There’s a small, curious bubble of both pride and victory inside of him. He knows her; her mouth only twitches like that when she’s nervous. 

She’s smooth as she speaks to the allegations against cruises, the culture that managed to flourish at not only Waystar Royco, but in every industry—“all of them,” she says, confidently, as if she believes what she is saying, “it’s not just us who have been tainted by this insidiousness and antiquated power structure that allows for women to be treated as mere objects to be handled and then cast aside.” She’s tap-dancing, he can see that. And she’s pretty fucking good. The language she uses is one of quiet and direct violence—make them pay, clear them out, clean house, punish to the full extent of the law. Her self-assurance is solid in her voice, but that tiny twitch is still there. 

“She’s, like, really good at this,” Greg says. Kendall shushes him. The female host leans forward, like she’s about to go in for the kill. 

“You know I have to ask,” she says. “About your brother.”

Shiv clears her throat. “It’s unfortunate that we as a family have to air our dirty laundry so publicly and any contention within the family must be addressed on an international forum.” Kendall rests his elbows on his knees and leans forward too, his hands clasped before him. “It’s unfortunate, but it is our duty. It is also our duty to do better than we have.” She pauses; she hasn’t answered the question. His mouth tips up. Evasive maneuvers are taught early, and exclusively by example, in the Roy household. 

“Ms, Roy,” the male host says, his haircut stiff and his neck tie over-bright in HD. “It’s assumed,” he drawls, “that you are here to defend your father and his company. What do you have to say in this regard, and what, exactly, do you have to say about your brother, Kendall Roy, and his monumental accusations? We have already received, of course, the official statement from your father, from Logan Roy, that classifies his son, Kendall, as, among other things, unreliable, unstable, and a liar, willing to do anything but face his own consequences. Do you agree with that assessment?”

“Rude,” Greg says.

There’s a flicker over Shiv's face, as quick as anything else either one of them would classify as a weakness and would work hard to hide. It is a very careful line she walks, and he can see that. He recognizes it; she’s backed into a corner. She has to say something.

“We,” Shiv starts. She shifts in her chair.  2:08PM LOCAL TIME,  the screen reads beneath her shoulder. She looks uncomfortable, a slight bend and give to her ramrod posture. “We as a company, at Waystar Royco, will have to face consequences for a history of malfeasance and wrongdoing. I don’t deny that.”

“Then what do you deny, Ms. Roy?”

Shiv says nothing for a beat. Back on the yacht, at dinner and after, she wouldn’t look at him. He tried to read shame in the imperious raise and tilt of her head, attention directed anywhere but him. Maybe it was there, but she behaved as if it had been her who was betrayed and not the other way around. She looks that way now, too—a wounded bird who thinks she can still fly. It’s thrilling, he thinks, for all the wrong reasons. 

“You have my father’s statement,” she says. “I have nothing more to say. I’m done here.”

“Um, what is she doing?” Greg says.

The male host clearly smells blood in the water and he pounces. “You don’t deny his characterization of your brother? You don’t believe the evidence your brother has put forward?”

“I said I’m fucking done,” and her feed goes black.

For the better part of a week, Siobhan Roy goes viral. She’s a meme, her face somehow grim, bored, and outraged all at the same time paired with her deadened intonation: “I said I’m fucking done.” The footage is spliced into popular movie clips and footage of a routinely mocked presidential interview and an equally mocked NBA post-game press briefing. One enterprising Twitter user has the great idea to intercut Greg’s stammering congressional testimony with Kendall’s birthday rap for Logan (it remains unclear who leaked the footage in the first place, back when it was that particular story and that particular Roy who captivated the internet; it could have been anyone in attendance, but also, Kendall is certain, definitely Tabitha) and caps it of with Shiv’s near literal mic drop:

“I said I’m fucking done.”

AND THEN THERE WAS ONE . Despite his better judgment, Kendall follows the link to the _Wall Street Journal_ article. A photograph of Roman loads. It’s one of his better ones; he looks less like a wanted pervert for subway sex crimes and more like a sleazy minor royal from some place inconsequential, like Monaco or Lichtenstein.

It’s a detailed article, describing a family saga that only vaguely sounds like his own. The author leads off with Shiv’s disastrous morning show appearance and the demise of what many insiders called her rising star. “It was exciting,” one anonymous source says, “to think the future, particularly for this company, could be a woman.” The article is riddled with anonymous sources (Kendall helped plant at least two of them), each more damning than the last, about the sinkhole that has become Waystar Royco upper management and the equally sloppy ego-driven succession planning. 

“We knew we were in trouble when Logan scuppered the well-built plan for the future we had worked so hard to craft. His legacy was secure, and his son was to succeed him. And then, it’s all gone to shit. Then, he’s stroking out. And we’re all fucked.” He rereads the quote. It had sounded better when Kendall said it over the phone; he should have done more with the promise of anonymity. 

“Look at him now, this supposed titan of media. He’s isolated himself from his entire family, save for the one son who has yet to prove himself.” 

Kendall wants to know who said that. He keeps reading, only to encounter more details of the lack of confidence in what remains of Logan’s inner circle.

“Roman Roy, Logan Roy’s youngest son,” the article’s author writes, “was recently named Chief Operating Officer of the company. His previous most notable responsibility included oversight and management of the failed launch of a Chinese satellite that resulted in yet more internal investigations and actual disaster.”

Kendall smirks, not unkindly. Roman’s going to fucking hate that. 

He better get used to it. It’s a ruthless fucking game.

iii.

Shiv is back in New York. Logan’s office is her first stop 

No one tries to waylay her as she enters, no one bars her from the fucking premises, which is mildly better than her worst case scenario fears, but it’s just like when he first brought her in—she can’t find her father anywhere. He is the Invisible Man, nowhere to be found. 

Shiv stands in his empty office and for lack of anything else, she considers the view. In here, it’s quiet. There’s nothing calm in that; it’s just another form of waiting. 

Shiv cuts her eyes to the glass that opens onto the rest of the office. No one is there and no one is looking at her. Slowly, she advances behind his desk. His pills are set out for him and there’s a ring on the desk from his coffee cup. She touches it; still wet. She must’ve just missed him. It’s in the spirit of that she pulls out his chair and she sits. He will tell anyone who will listen that he built this himself, and he’s not entirely wrong. But you don’t make the climb alone. 

She kicks her feet up on his desk and sits there, quiet, unmoving. Waiting. 

It’s Karolina and not her father who walks in to find her. “Jesus Christ. You scared me.”

“Hey, Karolina.” 

“What are you,” she starts, and then, as if registering Shiv’s place in the office, behind Logan’s desk, she frowns. “What are you doing here?”

Shiv doesn't miss the emphasis on the word _here_. “My dad works here,” Shiv says, every bit the part of the bratty teenage daughter who wants to borrow the car keys for the night. She swings her feet down to the floor and leans her head into her hand, her elbow bent and propped up on the edge of the desk. “I wanted to talk to him, but I can't seem to catch him anywhere. You think you can help me with that?”

And there it is, that wince of a smile of Karolina’s, apologetic without words. She’s a good gatekeeper, and Shiv hates that about her. 

“I’m sorry,” Karolina says. “He’s jammed up for the rest of the morning.”

“Lunch?”

“Meeting.”

“With fucking who? No wait, don’t tell me. I’m sure you’re forbidden, and what girl doesn’t love a bit of mystery about the financial future of both herself and her family.”

“It’s nothing personal, Shiv.”

Shiv arches an eyebrow. “Oh? For you or for my father?” Logan might accuse her of cowardice to her face, but he routinely pulls the same shit with her. He’ll hide out rather than speak to her. He’ll send proxies into the muck of it to take her down bloodlessly and neat. For a man who prides himself on being just that—a man—he works very hard to keep his own hands clean and pristine. 

It’s not ineffective though, she’ll give him that. The not-knowing, it’s worse than—well, worse than the flight here. The last time she saw her father, she found him waiting for her on his private jet after she was rushed from the television station. He looked at her with the cruelest thing he could offer her: abject disappointment. No, the second cruelest. The first, she has always known, is no attention at all. “I should’ve put Roman in, I should’ve,” he kept saying. He pounded his fist against the leather arm of his seat. “Damn!” 

“Well,” Shiv says to Karolina, cool as she wants to believe she actually is even as something volcanic and messy builds within her. She gets to her feet. “Tell him his daughter would like to see him, some day, preferably before corporate collapse or his own mortality hits the wall.”

She chances one last look at the view, and then she goes to see her brother.

The problem, Shiv can recognize near immediately, is that she doesn’t have a plan. Not even the bare bones of one. She can’t remember the last time she operated without a net. A failsafe. Nan Pierce’s dinner table, probably. It’s been all impulsive and downhill since. Still, she walks into Kendall’s apartment building as if he should be expecting her. 

He isn’t, but he’s more composed now than she’s seen him in a long time. Settled. He’s had time for any surprise or disgust or whatever he might feel towards her to be hidden away after the doorman called up to him and asked if he should let her in. In the shadows of his doorway, his face is unreadable. Flat. Different than the death mask he wore for the better of the year, but instead guarded, the way a bank robber wears a ski mask so his own face can’t incriminate him later.

“Look who it is,” Kendall says. “I thought the only time I’d be seeing you is on the fucking news.”

“That’s funny.” She stops directly in front of him. He looks tired, but in a good way, if that makes any sense. Like he’s been working, which is a different tired than the strung-out form she’s currently living in. “How are you?”

“On top of the world, king shit, busy as hell, you know.”

“Oh sure, I know. You gonna let me in or are we gonna play grab-ass in your hallway?”

He presses his mouth firm, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he nods, and he steps back from the door. 

"You wanna a drink?” he asks after the front door closes.

“Yeah, why not.”

She watches him go to not the bar cart in the corner of the room but the kitchen counter. He picks up an already open bottle of scotch and starts to pour. 

“So, how much shit he make you eat for it?”

She snaps to attention. “Excuse me?”

“Dad.” He hands her a glass. “For your little performance.”

Shiv’s mouth twists softly into a tortured smile only to immediately fall. “You of all people should know.” She clinks her glass against his and then takes a sip.

He retreats from her and collapses down onto the couch. He's still dressed for work. His formerly crisp white blouse is wrinkled now, one button too many undone to be anything more than a sleazy Wall Street coke whore (which, well) or a European playboy who lost the better part of his fortune in Monte Carlo. “Why do you think I’m asking?”

Shiv doesn’t want to talk about this. It’s too deeply personal yet entirely shared with Kendall and Roman, what it means to be the child of Logan Roy. What it means for their father to dress you down. Logan knows exactly how to take any one of them apart and make it hurt. On the flight back to New York, when he was willing to look at her, he told her that she only had confirmed what he already knew about her. She doesn’t have it in her. Why does she think he wanted to wait to announce her? He knew it in his gut: she couldn’t hack it. You have to be tough, that was what he said. “And you? You’re not tough. You cave. You’re weak. You want a pat on the fucking back but you don’t want the hard work. No. Not you.”

Shiv curls into the armchair opposite him. “I made it out alive,” she says. The words glide easily enough, and Kendall must know well enough not to push. He rolls his glass in his hands, far less scotch left in his glass than hers. He clears his throat suddenly and sits up straight. 

“So, who are you here for?”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, are you here for Dad or are you here for Tom?” There’s a brightness to Kendall’s eyes that’s long been dormant. She forgot that about him; she got used to Zombie Ken. “You know I love the guy, but he’s gotta be shaking in his fucking boots now that I got Greg playing ball on my team.”

Shiv doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t spoken to Tom. They had one long miserable conversation when they came back to the city, their travel separate, a model for what remained of their marriage. “I suggest you get a lawyer better than your mother.” That was the last thing she said to him. 

She twitches her shoulder. “Neither,” she finally says. “Me, I guess.”

“Huh.”

“Fuck off.”

“Call me crazy, but I don’t believe you.”

“Fine. You’re crazy.”

“He’s fucked, Shiv. You do know that, right?”

“Are we talking about Dad or Tom?” She can play dumb. She doesn’t like to, but she’ll do it. 

“And there’s nothing I can do about that,” he continues. “Dad maybe saved him once for you, but,” and he shrugs. 

And here they are. It’s been lurking in the corner since she came here. Before that even, like a dark spot in her peripheral vision that continuously spooks her. “What did Dad tell you?”

“What do you think he told me?” His mouth parts and he’s not so much as smiling as baring his teeth. Kendall when he thinks he’s holding all the cards is a very different Kendall than the beaten-down battered shelter dog he’s spent so long play-acting. He’s lighter, quicker, his face mobile and alive. He’s looking very purposefully at her own face, like there’s something there he knows he’s going to find. The satisfied twist of his mouth tells her that he thinks he has. 

“He told you.”

“Of course he fucking told me. Divide and conquer, oldest tactic in the book.” He pauses. “He said you got down on your knees and you cried and you begged for him to save Tom. At any cost. Anyone but him. Guess I’m anyone.” She has always thought of Kendall as too soft, too weak. That out of all of them he had the least of what it took to fill their father’s shoes. The man sitting in front of her right now couldn’t be accused of either. “He said he’d turned you loose, and knowing you, it wouldn’t be long before you turned up on my doorstep. He wanted me to know before I got in bed with you that you’d already fucked me.” Shiv flinches. She’s well-used to sexual metaphor fronting as nothing more than business foreplay, but it sounds wrong coming from Kendall now. Personal, in the worst way. 

“Are you waiting for my apology?”

“I’m not stupid, Shiv.” He drains the rest of his glass and leans back heavily into the couch. “I should be angrier, at you. I feel like I should be angrier. That’s how you’re supposed to react to a betrayal, right? But,” and he trails off. Shiv doesn’t know how to qualify or quantify what she thinks she’s feeling right now. She doesn’t want to. “It’s like we all served in the same bunker in the same unit and we all survived. You can’t begrudge the how.”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“Yeah, you do.”

Logan finally called him last night. His phone lit up with his father’s name and he stared at it. Wondered what it was like to have a father and not feel that aching bolt of fear each time you were presented with him. His name, his voice. The reach of his power. Kendall swiped the phone open. 

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Wasn’t sure you were gonna answer.” A rueful bit of a laugh carried over the line only to dissolve into a hacking cough.

“Yeah, well, I feel like our representation should be present if we’re gonna talk, don’t you?”

“Fuck off. Can’t a father call his boy without billable goddamn hours hanging over his fucking head?” Kendall said nothing. Logan sighed. “I wanted to talk to you about your sister.”

Kendall wasn’t expecting that. He was, more or less, expecting what Logan said next. “She sold you out, and it fucking hurts me to have to tell you that.” Kendall knew, in a way. He wasn’t surprised, he knew that much. He knew what guilt looked like when he saw it, when he watched it try to cower away from him, fearful and ashamed. There was only one thing she could’ve done to have made her behave like that.

And for Tom. Poor Tom, now fucked within an inch of his life. After the press conference, Kendall and Greg had followed Jess down into the garage. 

“Are we going to, like—okay, I’m gonna use a word here that I don’t mean, not in the literal sense, but the, the, uh, metaphorical? I suppose? But, uh, are we going to kill? Tom?”

“Greg, man. Come on. You fucking knew he was a dead man the moment you took those documents.”

“Yeah.” Greg nodded his head vigorously. “Yeah. Right. Shit.”

“That’s why you called me,” he said to Logan. 

“I thought you should know, son. She’s tired of this old packhorse and she thinks she can ride you to get what she’s after.”

“And what’s that?”

Logan exhaled. “Don’t be a fucking moron. It’s the same fucking thing you want.”

“So, tell me. What happened after?” They’ve each already polished off their second drink and he’s contemplating a third.

“What? Your ego wants a play-by-play of the shrapnel? Who got hit and how bad?”

Yeah, he kind of does want that. Kendall knows what he did: he took the chess board and he didn’t so much as knock all the pieces off but he rearranged them. He wants to know where everyone stands now. She owes him at least that much. 

She must agree, because with a long-suffering sigh she crosses her legs and begins. “Well, after you and Greg left the Titanic to hit the fucking iceberg, things pretty much went to shit. Dad went on the warpath, immediate defense. Scorched earth shit. You can’t be surprised about that.”

“I’m not.” He knows he has to be careful with Shiv. Handle her like a threat, a fucking suicide bomber sent behind enemy lines. “He’s gonna come for me, huh?”

“You think he hasn’t already? You saw the official statement.” She stops abruptly. 

“Yeah, and I saw you on TV, whatever that shit was supposed to be.” Why not twist the blade a little. She doesn’t wince, but her mouth purses and her jaw clenches. 

“Where’s Roman in all this?” he asks, pivoting the conversation. So far the only communication between the two of them was a text from Roman that read _what the fucking hell you fucking asshole_ that Kendall replied to hours later, an equally sparse, _I had to, sorry_. Radio silence ever since, which is’t something anyone can usually say about Roman. Someone must be guiding his hand.

“Last I saw he was still with Dad and Karl and Gerri, out on the deck chairs as the orchestra played and the ship was going down.” Something crosses Shiv’s face, too quick for him to categorize. But he has an idea. The rumors are true. Their dad wasn’t bluffing. She’s been cut out. It’s Roman’s turn to ride the carousel in the inner circle. 

“Do you trust him?” Kendall tries not to give anything anyway; he wants to see how she answers. 

“Rome?” She scoffs. “I trust him about as far as I can throw him.”

“The motherfucker’s pretty small, so that’s not saying much.” They both smile, the mockery or misfortune of a third party the only reliable connective tissue in their family. The smile slips off her face, as if it was never there. 

“No, Kendall,” she says after a pause. “I don’t trust him.”

“Do you trust me?”

She pauses longer. She traces the rim of her glass with her fingernail. “I don’t know.” She adjusts her posture. She looks very young suddenly, open and less put-together. “Do you trust me?”

“No,” he says. “Not even a little.” She blinks very quickly and lifts her chin slightly. 

“What are you doing here?” he asks again. 

“Maybe I wanted to keep my options open.”

“And what makes you think I’d want you?”

A breath escapes her. It could be the start of a laugh; it sounds a lot like a surprised gasp. “Look at you,” she says softly. Almost fond, and he’s always known less of what to do with Shiv when she is anything other than brittle and hard and sharp. The pout of her lips, the way she knows how to make her face go pleading and begging like it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to want something from him and only him. He always caves. She isn’t asking for anything yet, but he knows better than to trust anything about her, including the pride in her voice right now. 

She sets her glass down on the coffee table. She smoothes her hands down her thighs and gets to her feet. “When you finally do drag the blade across Dad’s throat? Make sure to invite me to the execution. Oh, and good luck. You’ll need it.”

iv.

Kendall has a new therapist.

His lawyer suggested it. “I’m not saying I believe the stories out there about you, and there are a lot—a _lot_—of stories, but what I am saying is, if you want to pull this off, and again, I am assuming, you want to pull this off, you need to be as clearheaded as fucking possible. Firing on all cylinders, as unimpeachable as any of you Roys can pull off. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

And, yeah. He did. He got a new therapist. 

Their first session was spent largely in silence. Something he could have told his new therapist is that when you are taught emotional vulnerability is an impermissible weakness opening up to a anyone, licensed or otherwise, is the same as asking a man to cut off his hand. Self-preservation won’t let you. 

“I remember this being easier,” he said. A self-deprecating grin was gone as quickly as it arrived. 

After that first session, he stopped at a corner market. His ride was waiting for him outside, idling alongside a fire hydrant. He bought a Monster energy drink. He pocketed a box of condoms as he left. He didn't feel much of anything at all.

HOW TO LOSE THE FUTURE AND ALIENATE PEOPLE: THE RISE AND IMMEDIATE FALL OF SIOBHAN ROY . The article title is truncated in the link Roman sent her via text, but she’s reading it in full now. 

_yikes_, he wrote, followed by some gif of a contestant on _Rupaul’s Drag Race_ or whatever. _you see this? vanity fair fucking HAAAAAAAAATES you_

No shit, Roman. “_From Daddy’s Golden Girl to Tarnished Brass_,” the subtitle reads, and she has some questions for _Vanity Fair_, starting with, “what the fuck” and then the follow-up,“how many titles and subtitles are necessary for one hit piece?”

She tells herself she doesn’t care, she doesn’t give a fuck, as she starts to read, but the article is fucking brutal. She reads about how she bungled opportunity after opportunity, each handed to her on the finest gold-plated china no amount of love or money could afford anyone but a Roy. The author of the article starts with her career in politics. Anonymous staffers from the Eavis campaign spoke to the writer on the record. “Her ego is out of this world. She always has to be right, she can’t accept criticism, not even a little bit. She flourishes in crisis and hostility, both often of her own creation. She’s impossible to work with, and the results really aren’t worth the headaches.”

“Fuck you,” she mutters under her breath. She keeps reading. Another staffer from the campaign went on the record: “You want her to be smarter than she is. Once you see her for what she is, you’re disappointed. There’s nothing special there. She’s just another product of nepotism, and not even a very good one at that.” If that’s not Nate, then she’ll donate a sizable cut of her inheritance to whichever fascist her father’s PAC supports. Fuck him; he’s just pissed she won’t let him stick his dick in her anymore. He’s biased. Where’s the journalistic integrity in using him as a source?

The author then goes into how she fucked up the promise of inheriting Waystar and her aborted rise to the top as the next CEO. “She has no experience in the field,” a Waystar source said. “Still, she walked in to each meeting as if we—career media executives—should defer to her.” _Vanity Fair_ even goes into her marriage: impending divorce, rumors of infidelity, “‘She thinks she is entitled to any and everything,’ a close friend of the family says. ‘Collateral damage does not exist for her.’”

“Still, more insidious rumors dodge the youngest Roy following the accusations against her father’s company. Allegations of witness tampering, for one, have recently emerged, contributing to a portrait of a woman who, despite what she may proclaim publicly, is more in line rather than at odds with the Roy family ethos: win, at any cost.”

Shiv is breathing heavily, her grip on her phone white-knuckled. “But in this family, perched at the top of the American capitalist food pyramid, what does it mean when you lose?” the article concludes. “As one insider told me, ‘When you fall, you’re out. She’s damaged goods. No one wants her, not now.’”

Her phone buzzes. Roman again.

_i take that back, sis_. She stares at the three dots as he types. _dad must fucking hate you_

She stands very still, the final quote still ringing in her ears. With a muffled shriek, she throws her phone against the wall.

Even on the outs, Shiv’s phone won’t stop ringing. Everyone wants a comment. She’s given none.

Instead, like an animal caught in a bear trap gnawing off its own leg, Shiv begins to craft her own plan forward. She knows there are really only two options: her father or anyone else. She could prove herself to him, find a way to wriggle her way back in and make herself invaluable, the prize to be won and not the other way around. But Logan does not come to her for anything now, not even to use her. She has shown her worth to him and he has shown her his estimation of her. It is nothing. The insult alone is too much to bear; she cannot stay at his side. But to leave—if she leaves, where does she go? Her first thought is Kendall. She pushes the idea around in her head carefully, as if too much pressure will make the thought scatter. Sink its teeth into her and hold. Her second thought is Sandy and Stewy. She knows Stewy only as an extension of Kendall, all ego and bro machismo, no concept of what it feels like to be denied what you want. She does not know Sandy at all. Her third thought is to walk away entirely.

She picks up her phone. She makes a call.

“Thanks for meeting me.”

Across the table Rhea grins. She isn’t dumb; she’s chosen a place frequented by the New York media elite. They will be seen. Good. 

“You must be desperate,” Rhea had said over the phone. “To call me.”

“Friends in low places,” Shiv said, tried to smirk.

“Is that what we are now? Friends?”

“Sure, Rhea. Why the fuck not.”

“I’d say we’re people with occasional overlapping common interests who happen to eat food. Lunch, on Wednesday?” and for lack of anything else, Shiv agreed. 

“I’ll admit,” Rhea says now, “curiosity got the better of me. And I find I have so much time on my hands these days. I’m sure you know what that feels like.”

Shiv doesn’t take the bait. “I wanted to talk to you about my opportunities.”

“With Nan? I thought you’d have learned better than that by now.”

“No. I only need to touch the hot stove once to know you’re not above burning me. I wanted some,” she waves her hand. “Guidance, let’s say.”

“Why can I not help but feel it’s you who will be guiding me right over the edge of a cliff?”

“Nope.”

Rhea’s mouth twists. “You finally found yourself a plate of humble pie and ate your fill?”

“I didn’t say that, did I.” Rhea waits her out. “I’m out of moves,” Shiv says. Honest, for once. 

“So you thought you’d borrow some of mine?”

“I thought, maybe, you, an independent party, could have a view that might see me through.”

“A tugboat cannot pass through a storm tethered to a sinking battleship. You’ll only take on water. How’s that for an independent observation?”

“Folksy, if not insulting.”

“Cut ties. Drop anchor.”

“Any other nautical aphorisms you want to toss overboard?”

Rhea shrugs. “Learn to swim. Or, I don’t know. Don’t. Stop struggling. You’ll only drown faster.”

“Thanks. Helpful.”

The humor evaporates from Rhea’s face. “I’m not sure what it is you want for me to say, Siobhan. I saw you that day. I watched from the car. You stuck the pin back in that grenade and put it back not in that poor woman’s hands but your own pocket without even a pause, let alone a tremble. You have your father in you, more than either of his sons, and it must cost you terribly. And the worst of it is? You don’t even feel the toll, do you? You want for me to tell you what to do? Why is that?”

Shiv clenches her teeth. “I wanted advice.”

“I walked away. It would be unconscionable for me to advise anything less.”

Shiv doesn’t say anything. Rhea watches her, a canniness Shiv had once admired and just as quickly came to detest.

“You know what you need to do. You know what you want to do. For your best interest, I hope the two align. I hope you know that you do not belong to him. You are not beholden. You can step outside. You have. A world awaits, Siobhan, and if you try, at least a part of it could be yours for the taking. Nothing’s ever easy, least of all the initial crawl out of the cave, but, well, you don’t need me to tell you that.” A grin flashes across her face. Rhea opens her menu. “Have you tried the crab here? It’s divine.”

v.

“Hi.” Shiv leans against the doorjamb as Kendall lifts his eyebrows. “Can I come in?”

After a pause long enough to be rude he steps clear to let her through. “Doesn’t look like I have a choice.”

Shiv snorts. She’s drunk. She’s drunk, and why the fuck not. Everything is off-balance now, the future uncertain. She cannot abide uncertainty, and that’s all she has been living under for the better part of a month. In that month she has come to recognize she is lacking a great many things: a partner, friends, capital. Allies.

“Have you talked to Mom?” she asks. She walks into his apartment. She wants to kick her shoes off, thinks better of it, then does it. 

“Yeah, what? No. Why?”

Shiv shakes her head. “Nothing. She just wanted to make sure, despite everything, we’d remember our obligation for Christmas.” She drops her coat, too.

Kendall blinks at her. “That’s, like, months away.”

“That’s Mom.” She shrugs. “And it’s, like, a month away.”

Caroline had first called her the day after that disastrous press appearance. She wanted to let Shiv know that she looked tired. Her face was so full. Had she been eating too much salt? She looked absolutely dreadful. “Not that it’s a competition, but your brother really did do so much better. Just because he decided to entertain the world, but especially myself, with his little tantrum it didn’t mean you needed to follow suit.”

She called again a couple days ago. “What did I do now?” Shiv said.

Caroline clucked her tongue. “A mother cannot call her only daughter? Darling, I wanted to see how you were faring.” She sighed into the phone. “I always knew your father would use you children then spit you out.” She said it with smug, rich satisfaction. That was just like Caroline: always suspecting the worst in Logan but with no compunction about handing her children off to him.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re unemployed, and unfortunately for you and this family, that is front-page news.”

She wondered if Caroline had framed the _Vanity Fair_ piece, had it hanging on the wall of Shiv’s old bedroom.

“Well, I suppose,” Caroline continued, "if you have nowhere else to go you can always crush at mine. Temporary, of course.”

“That really won’t be necessary. Ever.”

Shiv always hated the time spent in England. At least their father left them to fail, a ticking time bomb waiting to detonate in anger. Caroline was all micromanagement and hen-pecking, her face tight and pursed with disappointment. At least when it came to Shiv. 

“Let me remind you, even if the family business is falling apart, I still expect to see the three of you for Christmas. As discussed and as agreed.” Shiv rolled her eyes. Caroline always found a way to make Waystar Royco sound like little more than a mom and pop shoe repair shop. The family fucking business. 

“Yeah, Mom. Because that’s everyone’s highest priority right now.”

“Good.”

“I mean, we're all still going, right?” Kendall says now.

“Yeah. Sure. It’s Christmas.”

Shiv collapses down onto his couch. She thinks she might be a little drunker than she first realized. Her face is flushed with it. That’s always her tell: her face goes pink when she has tipped over the line from mere tipsy to something less governable. The way Kendall is squinting at her tells her he recognizes it. 

“How are you really doing?” he asks. They’ve reversed their seating from the last time she was here: Shiv on the couch, Kendall in the armchair. 

“Oh? You didn’t read about it in last month’s _Vanity Fair_? I’m as low as I can go, baby.” She snorts.

Kendall leans forward. “You been drinking?” He sounds like a fucking life coach for teenage delinquents, only doing the job because it was court ordered. She thinks the studio division released a movie like that two Thanksgivings ago. It did not do well. 

“What do you fucking think? Of course I’ve been drinking. I’m impulsive and foolhardy and I overestimate what minimal strengths I possess.” She counts her faults off on her fingers, slouched low. “My worth ranges from questionable to nonexistent, depending on who you ask.”

Kendall leans back in his chair. “Self-pity’s a new look for you. It sucks.”

Shiv ignores him. “So, which quote was yours?”

Kendall’s face falls. He almost looks hurt. Or maybe she’s too drunk to be here, to be able to trust her assessment of him. “I didn’t talk to them,” he says.

“No?”

“Nope. They called, said they were doing a piece on you, I said no comment.”

“I would’ve talked if they called me about you.” She doesn’t know why she says it. Kendall’s eyes narrow and his mouth creases like he does. 

“No, you wouldn’t,” he says.

She lifts an eyebrow. “Maybe I did. You’re very popular right now.”

“You didn’t.” His confidence is firm. He’s right, but she wants to know how he knows. 

“So what’s really going on? I know it’s not all…that. Shiv Roy’s never been known for her thin skin.”

She throws her arm over her eyes. She could very easily just fall asleep here. His couch isn’t even that comfortable, but it’s warm here. Quiet, but quiet in a way very different from her own place. “I’m turning over a new leaf,” she says into the dark. “I’m a snake shedding her skin and I am really very fragile right now.”

“Fuck you, you are not.”

She lets her arm drop and she looks straight at Kendall. He’s still watching her with that wry amusement. “I signed the papers this morning. Tom,” and she draws a finger across her throat. Maybe it would be easier if he died. If he died instead of left her. The thought’s too morbid and boring so she pushes it away.

Kendall regards her coldly, dispassionately, but without surprise. It’s like he can look through her, past her, she matters that little. Isn’t that not only the national opinion of her but her entire family’s?

“All that and you don’t even get to keep him.” She frowns. She clasps her hands together, but she took the rings off weeks ago. Tom wasn’t meant to last. Lately, she thinks she might have forgotten that. That there’s anything that lasts.

“Fuck off,” she says quietly.

They sit in silence until Shiv starts to talk. She starts talking, and then she doesn’t stop. She hadn’t realized how much she missed that, talking, making someone else listen to her. Her new place is unbearably quiet without Tom in it. He took the dog, which was expected; it was his. But she is deprived of even that company, too. She tells Kendall that it was Tom who left, and she’s not sure what to do with that. It’s always her, she always has one foot outside the door, her body halfway into someone else’s bed or someone else’s arms at the least, but this time, this time, even poised as she was, he beat her to it. She went to a bar, earlier in the evening. Before she came here. She fucked a guy in the bathroom there. It was miserable. Fucking for the sake of it, and she didn’t even come. He didn’t know who she was, and she liked that. She likes when people don’t know her name and her face is just anonymous enough to belong to anyone who makes up the landscape of the average person’s daily life. She likes teaching them who she is. What it means to be Shiv Roy. Or, she used to. She thinks she forgot, somewhere, along the way. Maybe it was that playground in downtown DC when she decamped from the Escalade, dark purpose beating inside of her, inevitable and unquestionable, _just following orders,_ she could say on the stand, and maybe she will have to do that if this continues down the road it’s headed. Maybe she got lost then. Or maybe she was lost the second she stepped into their father’s study and she saw herself from the outside, from his lens, and she forgot what she was supposed to be looking at, what she was looking for, arming herself against, she forgot herself, all she saw was that brilliant sunlight. Maybe then. Maybe it was riding in the car with Gil and with Nate, so certain she was better than this, better than them, or maybe it was later, holding Kendall in her arms as they both tried and failed to deny that he was crying. Was it when she approached their father, when the only name she could bring herself to say was Tom’s and in that way she damned herself. The right answer, she thinks, the one she refuses to take at face value let alone consider, is that Shiv Roy was always no one. Only a name. She was as fictitious as any other persona any other person thinks they can adopt, they can slip on and live inside and call themselves. She missed each play she was supposed to make and the idea of herself, the very thing she has always prided herself on, was proven to be little more than an empty act. Maybe you’re always lost to yourself if you don’t know what the fuck you are.

“Why are you telling me any of this?” Kendall finally says.

She swipes a piece of hair out of her face. She thinks she would very much so like to cry but she isn’t going to do that in front of him. Her pride, in tatters as it is, refuses. “I don’t know.” _I thought maybe you’d know_, she doesn’t say. “It’s just, shit. Shit I think about sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Shiv, come on.”

“I think I’m very lonely and I don’t know what to do with that,” she spits out. Kendall is very still. He looks at her the way he always does, whenever she begs him for something he does not want to give—with resignation and the dread-filled certainty that what she wants will be hers.  “Does that make you happy?”

“No,” he says. “Why would it?”

Shiv’s hair is getting longer. Kendall likes it better long.

He lets what she said sit between them, untouched. It’s rare to see Shiv as anything less than she always is: collected, assured, on the attack. He didn’t need for her to tell him that she’s been drinking. It’s clear in everything about her. The fuzziness to her eyes, the splay of her body, the uncharacteristic way she’s speaking to him now. Candid, open. He hasn’t seen her like this in years. He’s not sure if he missed it. 

“You know what he told me before he left? What Tom said?” She pauses. Kendall doesn’t think he wants to know. “He said, I used to think there was something broken in you, and if I tried hard enough I could fix it. He said, I know now it’s not broken. It was never there. You’re missing pieces, and I can’t do anything about that. He was crying. I wasn’t. I wasn’t sad, not then. I was angry, I think. And then, I was trying to think, you know, what was missing in me. I was trying to find it and give it a name, and I couldn’t. I don’t know what’s missing in me, but I know it isn’t there. Not the way it is for him. For other people.” She swallows. “Do you ever feel like that?”

He shakes his head briefly. He doesn’t want this conversation; he doesn’t trust it. “I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Oh.” She breathes it more than says it. “I don’t think he thought my love was real.” She smiles, but there’s something off about it. Something sick. 

“Was it? Do you love him?” He tries to change the mood, asks the question in a leading, near mocking way. Something flashes across Shiv’s eyes, like a glint of a raised knife.

“In my way. I did,” she says, her voice hard even beneath her light tone. “Did you love Rava?” She tries to mimic him, but with her, as always, it’s actually mean. 

He could laugh; instead, he smiles, close-mouthed and almost gentle. He knows exactly what she’s getting at. Only the Roys are the fucking Roys; how many times had they heard that line as part of Logan’s Christmas dinner toast?

“Yes,” he says. “In my way.”

A cool mask settles over Shiv’s features. She’s present now, here in this room, more herself than she’s been since he opened the door. Or maybe just the opposite is true.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.” He does not hesitate. He doesn’t need to. He won't ask the same of her. 

Before she leaves, he gives her a key to his place. He knows what the world looks like from the edge of the tallest building. He rather she not learn it. 

He fits the key into her palm. “If you need,” he starts to say and then he stops. She’s already frowning. You don't get to look someone like Shiv in the eye and accuse her of being lonely, even if she’s the one to call it by name. She won't tolerate it. “Whenever you want to stop by.” She takes it.

vi.

Kendall is the last to arrive at their mother’s.

He catches Roman first, eyeballing the sad state of their mother’s liquor collection. Roman should know better: the good shit’s always kept in the sitting room, never the kitchen. It’s all Chablis and cooking sherry in there, the scotch and the whiskey tucked away in her fucking Medieval Times cabinet.

Roman blinks up at him before he smiles, a pure shit-eating, cat-with-the-canary, teeth still wet from the kill kind of thing. Kendall’s answering grin is far more subdued. 

“Ho, ho, ho,” he says.

“Yeah, Merry Christmas.” They don’t so much as hug but offer one arm around each other and quickly let go.

“Looks like you really pick and choose which commitments you’re gonna honor, huh? The kiddos gotta spend Christmas without Daddy? Mommy kissing Santa Claus, that it? Or, wait, don’t tell me. You sold the kids to pay off your lawyers, killer?” Roman says. 

Kendall doesn't react for a beat. There's no way Roman has any idea what he actually said, but there’s a cold shiver down Kendall’s spine all the same. 

“Hey, man. Good to fucking see you too,” he says instead. 

Roman frowns at him, like he’s waiting for a punchline. It weirdly enough is good to see him. He had taken it for granted, how often he saw both Roman and Shiv over the years, the three of them circling their father like minor moons. They’re on different orbits now. “Yeah. Right. You keeping busy, fucking murdering Dad?”

“That how he tells it?”

“Oh, yeah. All drama, all the time.”

“You doing okay?”

Again, Roman looks at him like there’s a prank about to unfold. “Fuck you. I’m great.”

He leaves him. He finds Shiv standing in front of their mother’s mostly bare tree. He remembers now why they never came here for the holidays, beyond the obvious. The house is cold and drafty and the food Caroline serves is equally chilled and frozen in time. There is no one but each other and the house is too big for the four of them, even with staff (and, sometimes, Rory.) It’s as if tragedy or the gothic or simply mold stalks in the darkened corners of each room. The taps never run warm in any of the bathrooms and despite any renovation project the march of time refuses to cede defeat. It’s a miserable place any other day of the year, but especially so now, even with the strands of holly mounted in each doorway and the tree, denuded of ornaments beyond the dozen Caroline put up before boredom struck. She is staunchly against any of the staff decorating the tree; it sends the wrong message, she is now saying.

He watches as Shiv squints and scowls, her arms crossed. They’re their mother’s only guests. “To who?”

Befitting their mother’s estate, it is a cold holiday, no cheer. It’s the first Christmas in a long time where none of them are on speaking terms.

“Legally, it will do me no favors to speak to this galloping piece of horseshit,” Roman says after Caroline prods them into conversation.  He gestures towards Kendall with a smirk.

“Personally,” Shiv says, “I just don’t want to.”

Kendall glances at her in surprise, his mouth curling. She’s singing a very different tune from a month ago, when she wouldn’t fucking shut up. When she came to him for—what? Pity? Commiseration? Simply because he was there? 

Kendall is tired. There’s the stress of managing this power struggle, and then there’s the actual fracturing of their family. It’s like bad groundwater. It’s leeched into everything, felt by all. Maybe not Caroline. She's one of those rare flowers that blossoms in darkness, in times of others’ strife. "A fucking vampire,” Logan had called her on more than one occasion, when the only thing bleeding out was his money into her alimony agreement. 

He got a Christmas card from Logan, before he left the city. The same one he knows from memory he sends out to the smaller shareholders. Kendall can remember being fourteen and handling them for him, a now tragic sense of honor attached to the task. Stamping his father’s name into the card, careful with the ink for fear of smudging either the thick, matte card or the creamy envelope. A calligrapher handled the addressing ahead of time, someone else did the postage. All Kendall had to do was stamp his father’s name and close the envelope. It was an impersonal and tedious job, but it had meant he got to sit in his father's office after school, even if Logan himself was rarely present there, and he got to work inside the building his father owned, and that was the only thing he wanted. One of only two things he wanted. The other he thought might come by virtue of the other: a place within Waystar Royco, proximity to his father. Over the intervening years, Kendall has had three different therapists tell him the same thing: you cannot base your entire life around one single external desire. He knows that. For a little while he tried to do different, mismanaged the advice given to him, and built his life around cocaine. 

But he’s adrift now. He broke himself off by taking a stand, being his own man, and he wants to tell himself that none of the old desires are things he wants now. They are not things to build his life around. He’s free. That third therapist, the one he saw religiously every Friday the first year of his recovery, told him very sincerely and kindly at their last session that it was okay to move forward. “Even the drowned man surfaces,” he said. The phrase has mocked him since Shiv’s wedding. 

But he got the card from Logan. Mass produced, his name now printed directly inside the card and no longer stamped. _Regards, Logan Roy_. He set it, alone, on his kitchen counter. The next morning he put it in the trash. 

“Fuck it, I propose a truce,” Roman says suddenly. “For the holidays.” He cracks a hard candy against his back molars. That, or a piece of their mother’s toffee. “We’ll go to war in the new year.”

The truce holds well enough.

Despite that, conversation struggles over pheasant that looks as if it had died at the actual birth of Christ and Caroline broiled the mummified corpse in a Le Crueset dutch oven and then had the audacity to serve it. 

“So,” Caroline finally says. She turns to Shiv, her fork poised and knife raised. “Have you found yet another communist for you to lead to victory in the colonies?”

Shiv sets her fork down. “I’m taking time off, Mom. You know that.”

“Of course. I just assumed you’d be bored by now. I’m bored for you.” She takes a crisp bite of her overcooked bird. “It’s not like you have a husband to occupy your time.”

Shiv reaches for her wine only to find her glass empty. 

The annoying part is that she isn’t wrong. Shiv is bored. She’s without direction. Autopilot is taking her nowhere but more of the same, circling a very base truth about herself she refuses to look at head-on. 

Without a word, Kendall passes her the bottle. 

That night, Christmas Eve, she finds herself alone again with Kendall. Roman departed after his phone rang. He was coy and evasive about it, which meant it wasn’t Tabitha. Roman is different, he has been different. Still obnoxious, still childish, but there’s a solidity to him now. Like all it took was a gun pointed at his head to realize even Peter Pan had to grow up eventually. It’s annoying; he’s supposed to have failed by now.

They are in their mother’s gloomy sitting room, seated on opposite ends of the same overstuffed sofa. Shiv has an afghan wrapped around her; it smells like old wool and damp. The whiskey they share burns hot in her chest. There’s maybe a sip left in the glass she has loose in her hands, her fingertips smudging it. 

“I didn't get you anything,” she says suddenly. “For Christmas.”

Kendall tips his head back against the couch, looks over at her. “Yeah? Well, fuck you, too.”

“Did you get me anything?”

“No.”

She snorts. 

When they were younger, Logan made a game of even gift-giving. At Thanksgiving, they each had to draw a dollar amount. $5, $10, $100. Nothing more than $100. That was the limit they could spend on the person who drew the amount. And then Logan would judge them, determine who gave the best gift. She can’t remember if there was a prize associated with it or if it was simply their father deeming one of them best at something. Anything. Even then, they all thought it was stupid: what was worth giving for so little, and what was the point in limiting themselves. Half the fun of gift-giving was supposed to be the extravagance, meant not only to impress the recipient but anyone watching him open it. When Kendall was at his most fucked-up, he bought them all lottery scratchers he grabbed at a gas station in upstate New York, only for that to result in an epic row between him and Logan. That might have been the last time they played the game. 

One year, the year Shiv drew the $5 dishonor, she got three-quarters of a box of tampons from Roman, a used copy of _The Communist Manifesto_ from Connor, and, from Kendall, one of those mass-produced postcards you can pick up at a museum gift shop on your way out the door—probably the Met, maybe the Louvre; Kendall’s idea of art was bound by whatever the woman he was dating told him was art and the women he dated were easily impressed. On the back, it said, “Francoise Gilot by Pablo Picasso, pen and ink.” He signed it with a big letter _K_, not even his name. Definitely no, “Merry Christmas.” 

“I don’t know,” Kendall said,” it looked like you.” It didn’t, not really. 

Logan took the card from her hand and he looked at it, the back of it, too. “Sentimental, son. How nice.”

Shiv found the postcard when she was clearing out the apartment she shared with Tom. Separating out his stuff from hers, hers from his. She hadn’t realized she had kept it, all these years. It was jammed in with various papers and books, the things that had followed her from one place to the next and one year into another. She held the card in her hand and for the first time, maybe ever, she wondered what exactly Kendall saw when he looked at her. She still didn’t think the sketch looked anything like her. But, again, she kept it. 

She can’t remember a single fucking thing she bought any of them over the years.

Shiv’s slumped alongside Kendall now, pleasantly drunk. The house is quiet and they have continued to drink, inching closer and closer to the center of the couch. Their shoulders are touching now, her weight pressed into his side or his into hers. He's warm. It’s dumb how she misses, needs, things like this. Without Tom, her bed is cold. She is a cold person and she didn’t realize how much she needs another, warmer person beside her. To make her feel—what, exactly? More human, she thinks wryly. 

“I bet you stay up every night,” she says, quiet and slow. “Laying in bed, thinking about how much you wish Dad had just died. How much easier this would’ve been without him.”

Kendall stiffens beside her. She glances up at him and he’s looking down at her, furrowed brow and bitter, dumbstruck mouth. “Fuck off, Shiv.” He shakes his head. He doesn’t say anything more for awhile. “You wouldn’t have made it easy for me.”

“No. I wouldn’t have.”

“You don’t make it easy for me now.”

She frowns. She doesn’t know what that’s supposed to me. She looks down. Their hands are very close to each other. His thigh, her thigh. She reaches, her finger against the side of his hand. She traces down to his wrist. She does it again, tracing the thread of his veins along the back of his hand. His fingers twitch but he doesn't move any more than that. She turns his hand over, her fingertips light against the palm of his hand, more and more assured each time she touches her. His hand closes around hers suddenly, his grip tight. She doesn’t move now. His hand swallows hers and he holds her in place, his thumb rubbing at the knot of her wrist bone. He holds her hand the way you would apprehend a thief, caught out and guilty. She isn’t even sure, in this analogy, what she was trying to steal. 

They sit there, together, her hand in his, as if waiting for something to happen. It’s curious intimate, in a way the two of them have never been with each other. Her skin prickles, and she decides to label her reaction as discomfort. She tries to pull her hand away but he won’t let her; his grip only tightens. 

“It’s never easy for me,” she says, “why should it be for anyone else?” Kendall opens his hand just enough to curl his fingers between hers, the palm of his hand hot and flush with hers.

When he speaks, his voice is soft, that narcotic way he talks, a fucking auditory opiate. “He loves you best—it all could’ve been yours.”

That surprises Shiv. “He does not. I’m just the girl.” She digs the blunt tips of her fingernails into the ridge of his knuckles. He doesn’t react. “Besides,” and she stops. She feels very lonely and hateful and tired and sad all at once. She wants to take each and separate it, place it where it belongs, an isolated room, its own drawer. A place where she can close the door to it and pretend it belongs to someone other than herself. That it’s not hers, not really.

“What?” Kendall says. He’s dropped their joined hands down to his thigh. She can feel the muscle of it beneath his jeans. The heat. What if she let go of his hand, what if she instead gripped him there, her fingers trying to span the expanse of his thigh, and she could squeeze and squeeze until she felt something different than she feels right now.

“What’s his love ever gotten us anyway?” Her eyes are fixed on their hands, his thigh. She can feel his upper body turn towards her but she does not move. “What’s anyone’s love fucking worth?” It’s all currency, she doesn't say. And she's tired of spending it. “It’s nothing.”

“Hey,” he says quietly. “Look at me.” When she doesn’t obey, he reaches with his free hand and tips her face up towards his.

“What?”

Kendall’s looking at her face with that absolute and total concentration typically reserved for quarterly reports or attempts to outsmart the rest of the family or the schematics for any and all coups against their father. Deadly serious yet painfully unaware of future consequences. His face comes closer to hers. It’s easier to think of him that way—divide the man into parts, his face rather than Kendall. Kendall comes closer. Fear slots inside of her, similar to what a knife in the back might feel like. His forehead presses against hers.

“What?” she says again, less volatile this time. He has to be able to feel her breath on his face this close. She can feel his, hot and whiskey-stale against her mouth. Idiotically, they’re still holding hands. He raises his head and he kisses her forehead. She can hear the wet click of her throat as she swallows, the brush of his mouth dry and light. His grip is too tight beneath her jaw, his fingers caught in the ends of her hair, and she squeezes the hand she holds harder. His mouth descends, he turns her head, and he kisses her temple, her cheek, the hinge of her jaw. Her eyes are closed and she is breathing very fast. 

“Look at me,” he mutters, and it’s not obedience, not really, if it’s something you wanted to do anyway. She opens her eyes, her eyes are open, when he kisses her mouth. She can barely feel him, but the brush of his lips over hers is just enough, it’s too much, that spark and that helpless fizzle she hasn’t felt in fucking ages. If they stop here, if she gets up, leaves, it’s just a chaste kiss. They had too much to drink. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than what it is. Except she doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Kendall pulls back from her. His eyes are dark in the dim light of their mother’s sitting room, hooded, and the impulse is there, racing through her, right up to the edge of the cliff where the only thing left to do is fall. So she does. She leans forward, she lets go of his hand and she covers his thigh and she kisses him. 

This isn’t supposed to happen. It’s one of the few things she thinks she knows for certain right now. 

Kendall is on top of her. He’s kissing her. She’s kissing him back, messy and eager and not entirely coordinated. Her whole body twitches when he licks into her mouth and she bends her knee, opens her legs wider, wants more of his weight pressed against her. 

It’s not like she’s ever thought of him like this. That’s her first line of defense. Even as she’s digging her fingers into his hair, as she doesn’t stop him, kisses down his jaw until she’s biting and sucking at his neck, his own fingers pulling at her hair to make her stop, to get his mouth back on hers—she didn’t want this. But she’ll take it.

Kendall’s hands slide underneath her soft cashmere sweater. The neck of it is too tight around her throat, she feels like she can’t breathe. She makes a soft panting sound and his hands rest first on her ribs then down to her waist, the waistband of her trousers. This is happening, she thinks stupidly. With an abrupt noise pressed against her mouth, he shoves her sweater up over her bra. The air is too cool against her skin, but he’s covering her, her back arches, this is fucking happening. 

And why shouldn’t it? The voice in her head is her own, stubborn and implacable. They both have the same broken concept of intimacy. They both are alone. Kendall’s hands cover her breasts and she squirms. She wraps her leg around the back of his, and she can feel him, his cock hard against her hip. 

His hands are clumsy as they try to work to open her pants. His mouth is pressed open against her cheek, breathing heavily as he yanks her pants down barely past her hips. It’s enough though, enough for him to get his hand between her legs. It’s him not her who sighs when he first touches her. His fingers press against her through her panties, soaking the fabric before he delves underneath. She closes her eyes; she can feel his eyes on her. The flat of his palm is just right against her, grinding, the pressure near what she wants (because she does want this, the truth made slant, there is nothing Shiv Roy has ever done that she has not wanted), and then his fingers are inside her. 

“Jesus, fuck, you’re so wet,” he mumbles against, into, her mouth, she can taste him, and she wants to hit him. They can’t say these things out loud. Saying them breaks the spell. Makes this wrong. Real. Instead, she cants her hips and beckons him deeper. He obliges. 

She tries to stay silent. Her teeth sink into her bottom lip. She can’t remember if they shut the door all the way, if Roman shut it. She, for a breathless second, imagines getting caught. Something jackknifes mercilessly in her and she grabs onto his forearm. 

“Fuck,” he gasps. "Fuck." He hisses against the side of her face, “Tell me you fucking want this.”

She does slap him this time. The flat of her hand collides with his cheek, hardly any force to it. But her cunt clenches around his fingers, and Jesus, fuck, isn’t that enough? She’s dripping down his fingers, she can hear how fucking wet she is with each push of him into her—what more does he need from her? He snarls, fucks her harder, more deliberate, with his fingers. 

“Tell me you want this,” he says again, his voice twisted low, angry but also pleading. Begging her. 

“Shut up, shut the fuck up.” She can barely get the words out. “Shut up. Fuck me.”

He groans. He’s rougher with her than she thought he’d be (she wanted this which means she’s pictured it and when she pictured it he was on his knees it was submission it was her getting what she wanted and what she wanted was this, him, inside her—) and he mouths over her breasts through her bra, sucking at a nipple through the thin fabric. 

It’s like that she comes. She’s silent, but she shakes through it, something building in her that she suspects should she let it out would only result in her crying hysterically. Instead she covers her mouth with the flat of her hand and comes against his. 

Her body is still trembling as she watches him draw the fly of his jeans down. Pull his dick out. It’s already dripping over his hand and he doesn’t look to her to help him. She watches him, eyes heavy-lidded, as he pulls at himself, his dick decent in size, flushed dark, _his_. It’s Kendall’s. His mouth is slack, and he’s watching her, too. 

It doesn’t take much before he spills into his hand. Some of his come drips down to land on her bared stomach. He breathes noisily, that same jagged sound she heard pressed against her shoulder the night she found him in Logan’s office. She touches her stomach tentatively, a fingertip dragged through his mess, and then she looks up at him. 

vii.

Shiv wakes the next morning, Christmas Day, hungover and miserable. She lays still in her bed, the childhood room she grew up in part-time. The horror is not a slow thing to crawl over her but rather a freight train crashing into her. She feels sick. She closes her eyes again.

Her phone rings. She grabs for it blindly and then stares at the screen before she accepts the call.

“Hey, Dad. Merry Christmas.” She tries to do the math as to what time it is in New York. Is he even in New York? Did he travel for the holidays? He always hated New York at Christmas; a veritable fucking tourist trap for Santa Mickey fucking Mouse.

“Merry Christmas, pinky. Did I wake you?”

She can’t handle hearing his voice. The guilt and the shame only multiply and cascade through her. She licks at her teeth. Her mouth still tastes like Kendall’s. 

She clears her throat. “Yeah, no, Mom’s cooking, you know? Enough to leave you abed for a few days. How's that for Happy fucking Holidays.”

He chuckles. She wonders if he is alone. If Marcia is there. 

“How’s Kendall? Is he there?”

She’s going to cry. She’s going to start crying on the phone with her father on Christmas morning, and Jesus fucking Christ, of all the daddy issue cliches.

“Yeah,” she hears herself say. “I don’t think he’s up yet.”

“So he did come, huh? Good for him. Good for your mother. All her chickens home to roost.”

"Yeah." She doesn’t know why she says it, she truly doesn't. “Hey, Dad? Do you remember? Back when we were younger, and it was, you know, a game to see who could buy the best gift? We had those dollar limits, and—“

He laughs, loud and genuine. “Of course I fucking remember. God, but you were terrible at it. No imagination whatsoever, Siobhan.” He laughs again, quieter this time. “Never knew how to give people what they want.”

Even now, she still can’t win.

When she goes downstairs, she finds only Roman in the kitchen. He’s seated at the table, his iPad propped up against his bent knee, their mother nowhere to be found.

“And the runt of the litter finally arrives,” he says. "Merry Christmas, little sis."

Her chest feels too tight. “Ken’s up already?”

“Been up. Must’ve been visited by one of three ghosts last night, our little bent dick coke-nose Scrooge. Out there running laps like Forrest fucking Gump.”

Her relief barely reaches her. She grabs for the carafe of coffee.

Christmas brunch is interminable. 

The only sound is the clack and clink of cutlery on Caroline’s somewhat-good china. Kendall has yet to bring himself to look at Shiv. His life is marked by a great many milestones of the unforgivable and irrevocable achieved at the wrong end of a bender, but this is just—it’s irredeemable, he thinks. He still cannot believe he let that happen. The memory of it sits visceral and uncomfortable on him. He can still feel her, the hot, wet clutch of her around his fingers when she came. He pushes his breakfast around his plate, hardly eating. He had slipped his fingers in his mouth after she left. He knows what she tastes like now.

“Alright, man. What the fuck,” Roman says. “I know we as a family specialize in this grandly awkward, Mexican standoff kind of tension, but this is just fucking weird. What? I left early last night—to engage in, might I add, very healthy and normal phone sex with my equally healthy and normal girlfriend—”

“Ro-Ro, no one wants to hear about your sexual peccadilloes, least of all over Mummy’s Christmas sausages,” Caroline says.

Roman looks to both Shiv and Kendall. “So, what? You two fighting over the soul of the company again? Because I gotta say, I feel left out. I am, after all, the only one left in the fucking company.”

Caroline slices a sausage in half with some effort. “Lest you forget, I still own my shares,” Caroline says loftily. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Roman waves his hand. “Five dollars and a blowjob will get you plenty of those.”

“I’m tired,” Shiv says sharply. “That’s all.”

“Yeah,” Kendall says. “She’s tired.”

Roman squints. He points at first Shiv and then Kendall with the tines of his dirty fork and then moves it back and forth between them. “This is weird though, right? Like, not normal. I’m not being crazy, I can see things.”

And he can. Of the three of them, it was always Roman who could notice a tide change in potential emotional violence within their family, well before the current actually shifted. Before the wave crashed in. Maybe it was because he was the only one who Logan hit. You became attuned, Kendall assumes, like a weather vane. 

“Rome, man. It’s fine. We drank too much, said mean things. It’s cool.” Shiv finally does look at him, and he really wishes she wouldn’t. Her face is shuttered, cold and mean, none of the openness to her that she had last night. Because that’s what she was: open. Her eyes, her mouth, her legs. She opened everything to him, and now she’s looking at him like it’s only him to blame. But nothing is ever Shiv’s fault. He should know that much about her. 

Shiv is the last to leave their mother’s. 

“I am so glad the three of you were able to attend. Next year perhaps the lot of you will arrive less like a sad trio of death march finalists and instead bring a little zest. Though, I do have to say, it brings me such joy to see your father chiseled by his own children.” When Caroline smiles, it does not reach her eyes. Shiv crosses her arms over her chest. She says nothing. 

“That’s all power is, isn’t it? To hurt someone, to know so well how to do it, and to know that they won’t leave.” Caroline said it back before the divorce. Logan had already left her in every manner of speaking save legal. The bottle of white wine before her was empty. “Isn’t it?” Shiv was fourteen.

viii.

“What does it mean if someone knows something is wrong but they do it anyway?”

Kendall’s therapist looks at him with the mildest of curiosity. “Well, for starters, it demonstrates there is a conscience in play.”

Kendall doesn’t say anything for what the clock on the wall tells him is two full minutes. “Is it possible to come back from the things a person does?”

His therapist cocks his head. His notepad is arranged in his lap at a precise angle so Kendall can’t see what he writes. “Forgiveness. You’re talking about forgiveness. You have to choose forgiveness instead of punishment.”

His therapist’s office is low to the ground. He can hear the street traffic as it starts and stops and it’s almost close enough Kendall could make himself a part of the actual world rather than the one his family has worked to create. “And if you don’t deserve forgiveness?”

His therapist doesn’t say anything. He does that thing cops do in TV shows before the dramatic interrogatory shakedown. They sit in silence, they try to tease you out. Kendall doesn’t say anything either. His therapist yields first. “You don’t, or your actions don't?”

Kendall lifts his head. “What’s the fucking difference?”

Logan once asked Kendall a similar question, years ago. Back when Kendall went away, as their mother liked to put it.

Kendall had liked rehab. He was cut off from the world, and with that any expectation or responsibility short of the personal. He would get clean. He would start over. It was easy for him, in a place like that, to engage in magical thinking. He told himself that once he got out everything would go back to the way it was before. Magical thinking required a rewiring of his life as he remembered it, because if he remembered the truth he would realize there was no _before_. The night he met Rava he was fucking tripping balls and while, like the best of addicts, he told himself again and again he had everything under control there was never a time before when he was clean. To succeed here would require a change of his landscape.

He could not return. He would have to reinvent. 

He didn’t fully realize that until he spoke to Logan over the phone. He did not visit, and he only called once. 

”Do you actually think you come back from this?”

Kendall had almost completed his first month. Misery and self-loathing kept trying to find the cracks in him to enter, to break his delusion of the future. “Yeah, Dad. I’ll be fine.”

“That wasn’t a fucking question, son.”

So it is the New Year, and Kendall is waiting. He’s waiting for too many things. He waits for the bottom to fall out of all of this. He’s a fucking modern-day corporate Sisyphus, constantly rolling that fucking boulder up the island of Manhattan only to find himself at the bottom, under his father’s shoe, time and again. He’s waiting for Logan, to finally play his hand. He knows. He covered it up. If there is a way to spin a dead body, Logan will find a way, but only so long as he does not incriminate himself. That round sits in the chamber and Kendall wakes each morning expecting to find that it has fired. Sometimes, he flirts with the idea of absolute self-destruction. He could find a sympathetic reporter—if such a thing exists—and tell them everything. It was an accident, but an accident stops being exactly that the moment that intent is foisted upon it. The second he walked away, slipped into that bathtub, and thought the next morning he could return to the man he was the day before. 

He’s waiting for Shiv. He’s waiting for her to ruin him. She will, she already is; it’s only a matter of time. 

He hasn’t seen Shiv since Christmas at their mother’s. He has spoken to her, but only briefly and only via text. Each message is perfunctory and terse, more proof of life than anything else. 

Despite that, he can’t stop thinking about what happened. He can see her, her chest flushed down to the tops of her breasts, her mouth wet and swollen, shut tight, refusing to tell him anything more than what her body already was. He replays it in his head, at first as an act of self-punishment and then something more self-serving. He jacks off in the shower, guilty and shameful, thinking about her. Her panties soaked under his fingers. Her cunt, pink and wet against his palm. He can’t stop thinking about her. 

He fucks a couple of women, all of them redheads. The obviousness of it should be humiliating, but he’s the only one who can see the connection. The first he goes down on until she’s insensible and dripping down his chin and the creamy thighs draped over his shoulders could be anyone’s. He gets her up on her knees and he fucks her from behind, a hand knotted too tight in her hair. The second sucked him off, fucked him with her fingers at the same time, the way Naomi used to, and when he glanced down and saw red hair he nearly blacked out. He made her sit on his face after, made her anonymous like that, ate her cunt and her ass until she told him to stop and it was the unfamiliarity of her voice that broke the spell. The third he sent home before they'd even started. She was on her knees, his cock bared for her to suck, and just before she took him into her mouth, she called him, “Daddy.” “Give it to me, Daddy,” and just like that, it was over. His dick limp, the illusion broken, he wasn’t interested.

Shiv would never call him that.

ix.

Shiv is in a bar. This isn’t what her life is supposed to be. 

She thinks this with the startling clarity of self-awareness, the kind that usually accompanies a glance in the mirror after the second cocktail but before the third. This isn’t who she’s supposed to be. 

But her thoughts are too slippery, vodka numb and flat on her tongue, and she lets them escape. She turns her attention back to the man beside her. 

He’s blandly handsome and, as her mother would say, entirely plausible. But he isn’t where she is supposed to be. 

Shiv reaches into her purse for her phone. Her fingers close around something else. Her hand stills. She had forgotten that she took it. That he offered. She glances up, a smile pulling slowly at her mouth. She feels hot, reckless. She knows exactly where to go.

“Hey, you wanna get out of here?”

The light is on in Kendall’s apartment when he opens the door. He stills in the doorway. He can hear people. More than that. Fucking. He can hear people fucking. He walks deeper into his own apartment only to freeze.

It’s Shiv. It's Shiv, getting fucked on his couch. 

White-hot anger, that’s the first thing he feels. He wants it to be the only thing he feels. He fails. 

“Get the fuck out.” He says it, low and menacing, or at least that was what he wanted it to be. He can hear the tremble to his voice, and worse, he can see Shiv’s mouth. It slants satisfied even as the guy she brought into his home pulls back from her. Out of her. Kendall’s jaw tightens. She’s naked, on his couch. 

“You want me to go, too?” she asks, full-on Rita Hayworth bullshit. 

He ignores her. It’s easier to pin his attention on the bare space of wall above the equally empty fireplace. Her guest gathers his clothes up quickly, muttering something under his breath that sounds vaguely apologetic. 

Kendall follows him to the door. “Cover yourself, what the fuck’s the matter with you?” he snaps over his shoulder at Shiv. When he returns to her, she’s still naked. Soft pale skin stark against the black leather of the couch. He breathes in deeply. 

“Are you out of your fucking mind, what the fuck, Shiv?”

“I had him sign an NDA, in the car.” She waves her hand half-heartedly. “It’s in my purse, if you don't believe me.”

He’s fuming, he can’t look at her. He can only look at her. There’s a tension strung through her, even as she reclines, as if she wants to be something she's not. Her nipples are pale pink and hard, pointed, her legs aren't open wide enough for him. 

“Why the fuck would you,” he starts to say, only to stop himself. She tips her head back. He watches her throat work as she swallows. 

“I’m so tired of thinking of you.” Her voice is small. It doesn’t match anything else about her. There’s no performance to it, and he wants to believe it’s the truth. “I thought it’s not bad if it’s someone else. It’s only bad if it’s you.”

She might as well have hit him. _It’s only bad if it’s you_. Something nonnegotiable lurches inside of him. Very slowly, he takes off his coat. He wills his voice steady. “But it’s not bad if I watch.”

“No,” she breathes. “Not if it’s someone else.” Her eyes are shining too bright. He can’t decide if this is more game or negotiation. Either way, there’s a winner. There’s always a winner. 

“He was good for you? Better than me?” He undoes his cuffs. He rolls his shirtsleeves up. 

“I didn’t say that.” She parts her legs that much wider. He can see her now, bare and pink. Wet. 

“Did he make you come?”

He catches a flash of teeth as she opens her mouth. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think he did.”

He gets down on his knees. 

Shiv whines. There’s no other word for it, the sound like she’s been wrung out, a dirty dishrag, dripping. 

Kendall makes her come with his mouth, hot and fast, but he doesn’t stop. Even like this, pissed off and hurt by her, he still acts like he has something to prove. He’s noisy as he licks and sucks at her. She can’t stop squirming, like she’s trying to get away from him, get closer, and he holds her still with a firm hand. He tries to. He makes her come a second time; she feels winded, her thighs trembling. “Good girl,” he murmurs against her, and all she thinks is violence. She wants to hurt him, she twists her hand into his hair harder. Power is supposed to be hurting someone exactly how you know to draw their blood. Knowing they’ll let you. His thumb slips easily inside of her and a ragged sound breaks from her throat. She wants him to fuck her.

It’s too much, and she tries to close her legs. He slaps at her inner thigh. She gasps something like, “fuck,” or, “please,” or both. He’s breathing hard against her pubic bone, his fingers pressed in her before they curl and drag. His other hand reaches up her body to her tits. 

“If I’m gonna give it to you, you’re gonna fucking take it.”

She gets a hand in his hair and curls, her nails sharp against his scalp and he grunts into her skin. 

She takes it. Her body won’t stop shaking when he finally pulls off of her. When his belt clangs against the floor and he’s pressed between her legs again, his cock pushing against her, and she’s too sensitive. Her cunt aches when he finally pushes into her. She can smell herself on him, taste herself when he kisses her—and it’s what she wanted, right? This is what she wanted. To be found, to belong, to fucking matter somewhere. Anywhere. For it to only be her. 

“Tell me it’s only me,” she begs, and he does. 

"This doesn’t end well, not for us.”

Naomi had said it even before the yacht. They were in a hotel suite in DC and they both were still dressed and both mostly sober. Not for long, on either count. Her feet were bare and she had her legs stretched before her, balanced on the end on the bed, slumped low in an upholstered armchair. 

“You don’t have to…fucking, doom it like that,” he said. 

She shook her head. “I know broken things when I see them. And I know, I’m not the fix you’ll need.”

He felt himself getting defensive, even as he tried to keep his tone flat. “What the fuck's that supposed to mean.” He placed his hands on his hips. He was tired. His shirt was untucked, his collar unbuttoned. 

“I can’t put the things inside you that were never there to begin with. I’m not a magician, Ken.”

“And I’m not broken, Nay.”

“Okay,” she said, but she was right. He sent her from the yacht, on his father’s orders. He didn't see her after that. They spoke by phone after the press conference. She said she was proud of him, and he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had said that to him and meant it. 

Shiv doesn’t stay. He watches her as she gets dressed. She’s disinterested now, no show to it. She’s quiet. He remains still on the couch and he lets himself think of each and every thing he wants to do to her. It’s easier than thinking about anything else. He thinks about his dick in her mouth. Maybe she’d let him fuck her ass. Maybe she’d fuck his. Maybe they would come to find there wasn’t a fucking thing they weren’t willing to do to each other. You don’t come back, not from this. 

He closes his eyes as the door clicks shut.

x.

The Roys are on the cover of _New York Magazine_ again. It’s a photograph of her father, a bullseye target superimposed over his face.  MID-HEIR BATTLE , the headline reads nonsensically. 

That’s not their only spot in the news. Tom is expected to be indicted by the end of the week. She gets that news, not from Tom and not from her father, but a push notification on her phone.  FORMER ATN CHAIR TOM WAMBSGANS TO BE CHARGED IN FEDERAL INDICTMENT.

She scrolls through the article quickly. “_Wambsgans’s estranged wife, Siobhan Roy, could not be reached for comment._” They’ll have to get the divorce finalized before the trial. She'd rather be written about as the ex-wife, not the estranged wife. 

She looks out the window as the car pushes through mid-morning traffic. Sometimes she finds she still thinks about groveling. Anything, to get her back by her father’s side. She knows that begging, pleading, would grant her if not forgiveness then a pardon from him but she would never have his respect. 

She taps her thumbnail against her phone screen. She’s known for a long time the only way to earn that. The question is if she can teach herself to want something better. 

She stops by Kendall’s place, mid-afternoon. He greets her at the door, apprehensive and careful. His eyes on her are the same way. He tries to maintain an equally careful amount of distance between them. Right here and right now, in the cold harsh clarity of the afternoon, it’s difficult to even imagine what they have managed to do to each other. With each other. 

“What are you doing here?”

“You always ask me that. Each time I come by, the first thing you ask. ‘What are you doing here?’” She imitates his voice and Kendall doesn’t react for a beat. 

"I know how you are,” he finally says.

“Yeah? And how am I?”

“You’ve always got an angle.” He turns from her, towards the kitchen. “So, what is it, Shiv? What do you want?”

She walks past the couch he fucked her on last week. Their elephant in the fucking room. She looks away sharply. “I wanted to talk. Would you at least fucking look at me while I do that?”

He turns around. Skepticism shines obvious in his face. “You wanna talk? Okay. About what?”

“The future, I guess.”

She approaches him. He has the grace not to recoil or retreat. She stops directly before him, close enough to touch. 

“I know what I need to do and I’m too afraid to do it.”

A frown quickly descends over his face, marked with more than a hint of fear. “And what the fuck's that?”

“I should go. I should walk away and never come back. Sell my shares, buy a nice house, buy three nice houses, live in peace and quiet and pretend that I never once believed any of this could be mine.” She says it with stark violence rather than the calm that such a fantasy should deserve. “Unless.”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you give me a reason to stay.” She sets her face as carefully as she can. It’s not her little girl pout that can make him move mountains and it's a far cry from the way she looked at him, primed supine on his couch, naked. It’s something different. Something canny, and maybe even true. “You don’t have to take Dad down alone.”

Kendall doesn’t move. He’s a human fucking abacus now, calculating motivation and hurt and potential outcome with a detachment she didn’t think a bleeding fucking wound like him was capable of achieving. 

“I can’t trust you, can I?” he finally says. 

That isn’t supposed to hurt as much as it does. She thought he knew better. The only way you can trust someone is if you both have the capital—the intel—to destroy the other. Her body remembers his against and inside her. They have that now. They have an accord. Doesn’t he know at least that?

“You want to though, don’t you?” she says.

“Do you love me?” he asks, suddenly. With force. Shiv freezes. Something like fear or worse sticks inside of her, threatening to dislodge. For a brief moment, his face reflects her own: stricken. 

“Fuck you for even asking me that.”

Kendall grabs at her arm before she can storm off. He pulls her to him. She knows him like this now, his face so close to hers, close enough to kiss or bite or try to crawl inside. “Do you?” he demands.

She is breathing hard. They both are. He thinks he is asking her to show him the truth but he has shown his own hand. Love and trust—they’re the same fucking thing to him. Even now.

She brings her mouth closer to his. “Of course I do,” she says.

When Shiv leaves, she exits out into a cold and blustery February day. The streets are dirty, lined in slush, and her boots shine new and clean. A car is waiting for her, but she walks right past it. She glances back behind her. Gray winter sunlight glints off his building. He’s too far up and too far away to see. She ducks her head against the wind. Maybe Kendall isn’t wrong. Maybe that is how love is, too. It only works if you’re both holding a knife. 


End file.
